London based graphic designer Polina Hohonova was recently awarded by D&AD Yellow Pencil (Gold) for her graduation project at Chelsea College of Arts (Tutor: David Barnett)

Retro Serif for Monotype

Retro Serif is a project about the revival of glyphs in the Russian alphabet that had been omitted after the revolution. When the Bolsheviks came to power, says student Polina Hohonova, the letters I, Ѳ, Ѣ were omitted from the ‘new’ Russian alphabet as they were regarded as symbols of the aristocratic ‘High Russian’ and therefore representative of the defunct Tsarist Russia. Those symbols were part of the language of Pushkin and Tolstoy. “Reviving these characters is a protest against the prescribed dictatorship of the language,” she says.